Liu Xia is the wife of Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize awardee Liu Xiaobo (Liu Xiaobo is currently serving an eleven-year sentence in China for the Charter 08 Manifesto).

The excerpt from Black Sail is in her collection, Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015)

Black Sail (translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern)

You reach out your arms and pull the man
close, quiet, until his hair floats like seaweed.
Then you calm down and light a cigarette — green smoke
rises. The next day, when firecrackers
clear the way for a full black sail,
you become a gust of wind, a cloud, an eye.

When self was with Angela Narciso Torres in Venice Beach in November, Angela took self to A Small World, a fabulous bookstore fronting the beach. Self ended up getting poetry collections by Neruda and Tomas Transtromer.

This evening, self is looking through Transtromer’s collection The Great Enigma (Pretty fabulous, that title!), translated by Robin Fulton.

The back cover has the New York Times quoting Transtromer as saying, “My poems are meeting places.”

Oh. Wow. Self can’t even. Just. Kill her now.

Here’s an excerpt from Transtromer’s Balakirev’s Dream:

The black grand piano, the gleaming spider trembled at the center of its net of music.

In the concert hall a land was conjured up where stones were no heavier than dew.

In this season of giving, where every delivery of mail brings requests for donations, naturally self feels she has to be rather sparing about her charity (First of all, her 1998 Nissan Altima broke down again). But here’s one organization that self feels absolutely no doubt about supporting: Doctors Without Borders.

Doctors Without Borders — Her first December in Bacolod, 2010, they occupied a whole floor of L’Fisher Chalet.

Self saw these doctors (whom she mistook for tourists) on the rooftop restaurant of the hotel and was casting all sorts of nasty aspersions on their motives for being in Bacolod.

Then she found out from one of the L’Fisher Chalet staff that the people she had assumed were tourists were actually doctors. In fact, the staff assumed self was a doctor, too. She also found out that Doctors Without Borders comes every year, that the doctors stay for a month, that they go out into the poorest villages and provide free medical care. And they’ve been doing this for a while.

They were in west Africa to deal with the Ebola crisis (and more than one did end up contracting Ebola themselves).

They were in the Philippines during Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, bringing their inflatable hospitals to reach typhoon survivors in the most isolated, hard-hit regions.

From Hillel Wright’s review of A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World, in the Summer 2008 Pacific Rim Review of Books:

Okay, so having produced just two Nobel laureates in literature in the 20th century (Yasunari Kawabata in 1968 and Kenzaburo Oe in 1994), the Japanese government, cultural and literary establishments are now engaging in a rather shameless promotional campaign to see novelist Haruki Murakami win a Nobel Prize.

Murakami, arguably the most popular Japanese writer outside Japan is, ironically, not extremely popular in his own country. Except for his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood, which sold over a million copies and made him famous in Japan, Murakami’s works have done better in translation than in his native Japanese. His books have been translated into over 30 languages and have been published in nearly 40 countries around the world, from Brazil to Bulgaria and from Israel to Taiwan.

Murakami’s works are especially popular in Scandinavia and the Baltics, with Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all offering translations. Another irony is that the original Japanese title of his novel Norwegian Wood, “Noruwei no Mori”, the translation of the Beatles’ hit “Norwegian Wood”, is actually a misinterpretation of the original. “Mori” in Japanese means “forest” while the “wood” in the Beatles’ song actually refers to the material used to make cheap furniture. Perhaps the title should have been “Noruwei no Ki.”

Wright’s essay is a fascinating one, dear blog readers. Among other things, he points out what many people have suspected: “Murakami is popular abroad because he is not typically Japanese.”